Houston Officials Say Sewage Overflows Are Unavoidable

Houston, we have a problem.

Sewage overflows that plague the Texas city during heavy rain have local activists and residents fed up. But city officials say nothing can be done.

Flooding in late October and over Halloween weekend left downtown Houston covered in an unpleasant mess of raw sewage and silt.

“It’s filthy,” said Demarcus Hill, a student at the University of Houston, per KHOU. “It’s low-key disgusting. Just raw sewage. It’s the city’s waste, like, in the streets.”

The gist of what happened: “The city’s overwhelmed wastewater system flushed more than two million gallons of raw sewage into Houston’s bayous over the weekend. Houston’s public works department said the deluge that fell on Houston would’ve swamped any city’s sewage system.”

City officials did not present an alternative for the future. “The city says there is no way to prevent raw sewage from spewing into the streets when we receive as much rain as we did [in late October],” KTRK reported.

Alvin Wright, spokesman for the City of Houston's Public Works Department, “says it's not something which can be fixed. As he explains it, the storm water inundates the sanitary sewer system upstream through manhole covers. That storm water overburdens the sanitary sewer system and at points downstream it then can create so much pressure that the water and the raw sewage push out of manhole covers,” the report continued.

"When you have that much water coming down on the city of Houston and flooding in those areas, too, you're going to find the infrastructure will be compromised,” he said, per a previous KHOU report.

Gary Norman, a spokesman for the public works department, offered a similar explanation. “When you get 10 inches in less than a day, you’re going to overwhelm the carrying capacity of any system,” he said, per the report.

Local activists say the problem is a recurring one, noting that the same problem arose during a flood the month before.

“We should not accept this at all,” said Steve Rupp, the water quality director for the Bayou Preservation Association. “I mean, this is not what should happen in a modern city. We shouldn’t have sewage overflows like this.”

"It came over the sidewalk, into the windows," said local resident Michael Rogers, per KHOU.

"I thought it was gross, totally disgusting and quite honestly, I don't understand why," said resident Gabriel Gomez.

For more on the water management issues presented by storms, visit Water Online’s Stormwater Management Solutions Center.